Gustave Verbeek was born in Nagsaki,
Japan, in 1867. He was the son of a Belgian missionary, head of the
Tokyo School, which would become the Imperial University. His childhood
was spent in Japan, he then studied in Paris, and finally moved to the
United States in 1900 to begin a collaboration with a number of important
illustrated magazines (Harper's, Saturday Evening Post).
A few years later he entered the New York Herald, where he published
three original comic strips: The Upside Downs of Little Lovekins
and Old Man Muffaroo (1903-1905 - this could be read rightside-up
and upside down, every panel making sequential sense in both directions,
a real tour de force!), The Terrors of the Tiny Tads (1905-1915),
and The Loony Lyrics of Lulu (1910). In the 1920s Verbeek retired
from comics and became a painter and sculptor. He died in 1937.

The Terrors of the Tiny Tads
first appeared on 15 September 1905 in the New York Herald, the
same day that McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland started to appear
in the same newspaper, and was closed in 1915 or 1916 (not 1911 as Marschall
maintains, the above strip is from 1913).

"The cast was a group of small children who were never named beyond
the generic Tad [...] The Tads were doomed to perpetually meet nightmarish
creatures, who were seldom cute and often menacing. And when they were
neutral... the things were just plain weird. Animals combined to form
a new creature, and sometimes they mutated with inanimate objects like
suitcases, trolley cars, and hotels. Not content with devising the most
bizarre beings and doings of his day, Verbeek set another challenge
for himself, a habit he was evidently unable to shake from the Upside-Downs
days: the weekly invention of clever names.

Hence the weekly fever dreams of the Tads' world are crowded with Hippopautomobiles,
Sweet potatoads, Hotelephants (they were also dubbed 'Quadrupedifices')
and Dandelionesses. Not content to give his young readers lumps in their
throats and skips to their hearts, Verbeek tortured himself with these
maniacal challenges of nomenclature."

From Rick Marschall, Of Daydreams and Nightmares, in Nemo,
the Classic Comics Library, no. 20, July 1986, p. 43.